Mental Capacity Act

Definition

Medical

noun a piece of UK legislation, introduced in 2007, that establishes five principles in relation to mental capacity and medicaltreatment, namely that patients should be assumed to be capable of making their own decisions, that they should be given support in decision-making, that it is patients’ capacity to make decisions that should be judged, not the decisions themselves, that treatment must be in patients’ best interests, and that treatment should restrict rights and freedoms as little as possible